Ask HN: Would humanity benefit from designing a new computing platform

3 points by BraverHeart 2 years ago | 6 comments

What if we took all the lessons learned from the past 50 years and rebuilt a brand new computing platform, hardware and software, from scratch, removing all the extra layers of complexity, removing all the bottlenecks and not worrying about backward compatibility. We could even let go of the 0s and 1s, and replace it with something else.

Are there companies working on such a project? Would this allow us to gain orders of magnitude of value in terms of performance.

Note: My question concerns reusing existing base manufacturing technologies, I'm not talking about something like Quantum Computing.

DemocracyFTW2 2 years ago |

There was at least one computer in the past that used quinary (if that is the term), i.e. it's vacuum tubes had five distinct voltage levels IIRC. This was done because less voltage would have meant more tubes, hence more material, more power consumption, and, importantly, more points of failure; more than five levels would've been too difficult / error prone to distinguish, also resulting in less efficiency.

It is not out of the question that some silicon blueprint could or does result in a component which can safely distinguish between more than two states.

smoldesu 2 years ago |

> We could even let go of the 0s and 1s, and replace it with something else.

We could, but I don't think there's much of a point. 1s and 0s are easy to work with because it's simple to represent their absolute state with complete precision. Storing, retrieving, analyzing and operating-on non-binary data is computationally expensive for minimal gain in performance.

The end user hardware isn't perfect, but you'll be hard-pressed to match the efficiency of a classical computer.

kakaz 2 years ago |

Think of evolution. You have reptile brain inside, still. X86 is a base of 120% of products. Want to fight court battle against Microsoft?

yuppie_scum 2 years ago |

Why reinvent the wheel?

Ekaros 2 years ago | |

Actual bearing and maybe not having the wheel be stone disk could be reasonable improvements on a wheel...

I can't believe that either NT or "Unix" is best we can do. And same goes for larger architecture...

WallyFunk 2 years ago | |

X86 is a broken wheel. It's complex, and thus buggy. We can patch and mitigate all we want, but it doesn't address the underlying ugliness.